The Science-Fantasy Megapack Page 14

  “Yes—yes, of course he was. He was going to throw a power-switch which would have.…” Lucy’s voice trailed off as she gazed around the cavern and at the unfamiliar blasting equipment. “Everything’s different,” she faltered. “There’s no switchboard now, and no door.… Tell me, who are you?”

  When none of the men answered Lucy’s gaze swung to the calendar, or at least to the place where it should have been. There was only a mass of crumpled rock. She gave a gasp.

  “There was a calendar there!” she cried. “It said seventeenth of August, two thousand and nine. Where’s it gone?”

  “Two thousand and nine!” Buck Cardew exclaimed. “Hell! No wonder you’re dressed in such old-fashioned clothes!”

  “Old-fashioned?” Lucy’s voice caught a little as she looked down at herself. “But how can they be? It’s still two thousand and nine, isn’t it?”

  Nobody answered. Grim looks passed between the men.

  “Well, isn’t it?” she cried, nearly in tears; then Clem put a gentle arm about her shoulders.

  “Better hang on to yourself, miss,” he said gravely. “This is the year 3004 A.D.”

  All trace of colour drained from the girl’s face. She half tried to smile and then went serious again. She was obviously utterly stunned.

  “3004,” she repeated. “That’s nearly a thousand years. It can’t be true! It just can’t!”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Clem said, his voice quiet as he saw her distress. “We can’t even begin to understand the situation or try to help you until we hear your side of the story. Who are you? What happened in this cavern?”

  “I’m Lucy Denby and—” Slowly the girl unfolded the story. The men listened in grim silence, looking at each other when it was over.

  “I wish I could have had a few moments with that Bryce Fairfield,” Buck murmured, clenching his fists. “I’d have hit him so hard they’d have had to scrape him from the wall.”

  “A thousand years!” Lucy repeated again. “I just don’t understand it! What am I to do? Do you realize what has really happened to me?”

  “You felt nothing during this enormous lapse of time?” Clem asked thoughtfully.

  “Nothing whatever. Except that I seem to remember I felt a passing wave of dizziness when Bryce threw in the switches. Even then I hardly realized what he had done. I couldn’t see anything clearly through the bubble wall. Then, in what seemed a matter of seconds—certainly no longer—you appeared. So now,” Lucy finished hopelessly, “I’m utterly alone. My husband long since dead, and my baby too, assuming that he ever grew up.”

  “Unfortunately,” Clem said, “we can’t put back the clock. All we can do is offer you the hospitality of this day and age.” He rubbed his jaw and then gave an uneasy glance. “At least, I hope we can offer you our hospitality,” he amended. “You see, things have changed a lot whilst you have been a prisoner. Today everybody is tabulated and indexed, and you’re a sort of odd girl out. If your lack of an index-card is discovered you may be executed.”

  “Executed!” Lucy stared in horrified amazement.

  “Anybody without an index-card, without even a proven line of descent, is deemed outcast by the Government Council or else the Master himself, and promptly eliminated. In at way spying and sabotage is crushed. We shall have to be extremely careful how we handle things. What makes it doubly difficult is the fact that a new war is threatening.”

  “There is still threat of war?” Lucy asked hopelessly. “There was a similar state of affairs when in my own time, various countries were at loggerheads with each other—”

  “Long forgotten,” Clem interrupted. “Today the trouble is between hemispheres. This is the West against the East: something to do with planetary concessions. But it’s war just the same, and that being so, your position is awkward.”

  “Surely I will be allowed to explain the situation? Or you can?”

  “Not on the basis of what I know so far,” Clem answered, sighing. “I don’t even begin to understand the genius of Bryce Fairfield. I’ll have to work out exactly what he did and then submit my findings to the Master. Once he is satisfied—and there is no guarantee that he will be—you will get city status and become one of us. But in the meantime—”

  “There’s my wife,” Buck Cardew interrupted. “She was to have Worker Ten to assist her in house duties. I could arrange it so that Worker Ten is bought off and Mrs. Denby here takes her place. It’s been done before and could be done again. How about it?”

  “Risky, but maybe worth it,” Clem answered. “We’ll do that; then I can keep in touch with you,” he added, looking at Lucy. “For the moment you had better stay here with us and then come along home after dark. We’ll look after you—and you’ll have an awful lot to see,” he finished. “‘Things have changed enormously since your day.”

  “I can imagine,” Lucy said, and gave her first faint smile.

  At about this time, in the wilderness of the city’s huge powerhouse, Chief Engineer Collins studied the peculiarity with cold blue eyes. For the first time in his thirty years’ supervision of this master power station something was wrong. The smooth night-and-day rhythm of the giant engines, which fed a city sprawling over nearly every part of what had once been the British Isles, fostered and tended by complicated robots, was being interrupted. There was a very slight flaw in the uptake of power. Perhaps it was only carbon dust. It had happened once before, twenty years earlier.

  Collins summoned testing-robots. They came up with their many instruments and gathered about him, obeying all the commands he planted in their reasoning brainpans. With mathematical exactitude, far keener than even his excellent reasoning, they traced the flaw and handed out the report.

  “Intermission fault of one ten-thousandth of a second,” Collins mused. “Bad! Definitely bad!”

  Turning, he slammed in switches and was immediately connected with the slave powerhouses in other parts of the city.

  “What’s your power report?” he questioned.

  It was given him immediately. There was nothing wrong there, but there was here, and what was more it was becoming worse. The sweetly-humming giant had taken on a definite lobbing sound, like the thud of a flat tire on a smooth road.

  Struck with the unbelievable thought that there might be a flaw in the metal, Collins turned to the gigantic balance wheel, which formed the basis of the master-engine. He had just reached it when something happened.

  A pear-shaped swelling appeared suddenly on the edge of the mighty wheel, only visible as a mist with the wheel’s rotation. It grew at phenomenal speed—and then exploded! Flung by centrifugal force, mighty pieces of metal flashed to all parts of the powerhouse. One struck Collins clean on the forehead and dropped him dead where he stood. The robots looked on impartially, their guiding genius lying mangled on the floor.

  Immediately the other engines ceased to work as an automatic contact breaker clamped down on the entire area. The alarms rang. The emergency bulb went up on the desk of the chief powerhouse controller at City Center.

  Breakdown, for the first time in thirty years! It was incredible.

  CHAPTER THREE: BRIDGE OF DEATH

  Clem Bradley, Buck, and Lucy Denby, were in Clem’s little autobus doing two hundred miles an hour down the traffic-way bridge to City Center when the power failed. All of a sudden the vast, long line of light and steel that had held the girl in thrall went into total darkness.

  “What the hell—!”

  Clem let out a gasp of amazement, then his hands quickly tightened on the switches. Never in his experience had he come up against a sudden blackout like this. It was utterly unheard of. He slammed on the emergency brake, but either he slammed too hard or the steel was faulty, for the pedal snapped clean off under the pressure.

  He was too astounded, too desperately busy, to exclaim about it. Like a madman he tried to cut down the power of the engine as the autobus raced onwards into the unrelieved darkness, the bridge girders, faintly visible a
gainst the sky, whipping past at dizzying speed.

  “Hey, stop this thing!” Buck Cardew yelled. “There may be something ahead, and if there is, at this speed, it’ll be the finish. Where’s your search-lamp?”

  “Switch it on for me,” Clem panted. “I’ve all I can handle!”

  Throughout this hair-raising performance Lucy sat in frozen alarm, the wind rushing past her face as Buck fumbled on the control panel. Then suddenly the blinding cold-light brilliance split the darkness ahead.

  “Look!” Lucy cried hoarsely.

  But Clem had already seen it—the unbelievable—a vast fissure glowing mysteriously across the traffic-way itself. The bridge was breaking in two! There could be no other explanation. And below there was a drop of a quarter-of-a-mile into the brimming waters of a river.

  “Jump it!” Buck yelled. “Full belt! You’ll just make it!”

  The why and wherefore flashed unanswered in Clem’s brain. He gave the autobus everything it had got, shot over the crumbling edge of the fissure, then slammed with shattering force onto the other side of the bridge. So terrific was the shock of the front wheel axle snapped like a carrot, slewed the car round, and then-plastered it with splintering impact against the cross-girders at the bridge side.

  “Whew!” Buck whistled in relief, mopping his face. “That was too close for comfort. You okay, Miss Ancient History?”

  He heaved the slumped girl up beside him and she gave a nervous little laugh. “Yes—yes, I’m all right, but—” She stared at the waters so far below and wondered if the river might actually be Old Father Thames still on his way to the sea; then she twisted her head to survey the still enlarging gap in the bridge. “Just what is wrong?” she asked finally.

  “Hanged if I know,” Clem snapped. “First my brake pedal broke off like a match-stick, then the front axle gave way, and the bridge is rapidly—”

  He broke off and stared as headlights flashed into view on the distant dark stretch.

  “They’ll go over!” he gasped, vaulting over the car’s side. “Maybe I can warn them in time.”

  He went pelting back along the bridge, pulling out the safety red light he used underground and flashing it as he ran. Desperately he waved it to and fro. He saw, as the first vehicle came hurtling nearer, that it was a public service transport. Closer—closer, until he could read its brightly illuminated number-plate—KT 897.

  “Stop!” he screamed helplessly. “Stop, you fool!”

  The driver saw the danger too late. The transport went plunging over the edge of the broken bridge, a private autobus behind it following suit. Dazed with horror Clem watched both vehicles go hurtling down into the wastes below. The cries of the doomed people floated up in a ghastly echo.

  “My God,” he whispered. “All those folks—”

  “I can’t get the emergency station,” Buck said, hurrying up. “If the bridge is cracked then the wires along it will be too.” He stopped, his eyes widening as he stared at the fissure. “Look at the infernal thing, Clem! It’s still enlarging—!”

  “I know.” Clem’s voice was grim as he shifted his gaze from the depths below. “There’s something incredibly wrong about all this, Buck. First the light and power goes off, and then this—”

  “Altogether,” Lucy remarked, not finding it easy to keep a hint of sarcasm from her voice, “my arrival in a time a thousand years ahead of my own hasn’t been too auspicious.”

  “Believe me, Ancient, things like this never happened before,” Buck insisted.

  “Confound it, Buck, the lady has a name,” Clem objected, but the girl only laughed.

  “I rather like being called ‘Ancient’. It’s so different. And it sounds natural coming from you, Buck.”

  Buck scratched the back of his thick neck as he tried to determine whether Lucy was serious or not; then Clem spoke again, obviously preoccupied with the problem on hand.

  “It’s incredible that tried and tested steel, rust-proof and everything, should start behaving in this way! Forgetting the brake and axle on the autobus for a moment, take the case of this bridge. For a hundred years it has been regularly overhauled. Supersonic testers have proved it to be absolutely perfect without even an air bubble or inner fault. Yet now it behaves as though suffering from atomic blight—”

  “What’s that?” Lucy enquired curiously.

  “Oh, a sort of corrosion which afflicts metals if they have been in contact with atomic radiation anywhere. But in the case of this bridge such a thought isn’t even admissible. No; it’s something else, but don’t ask me what.”

  “Something coming up from the distance,” Buck remarked. “It looks like an emergency car.”

  He was right. In a few moments an emergency official transport came speeding up from behind them. A uniformed officer jumped out and came hurrying forward.

  “What’s gone wrong here?” he demanded, and Buck promptly gave the details whilst the official glanced around him, taking in the situation. Finally he turned to his man.

  “Send a radio call and have the bridge closed at both ends pending examination. Had a smash, eh?” he went on, surveying the shattered autobus.

  “Just leapt the gap in time,” Clem answered.

  “I don’t understand this at all,” the officer continued, frowning. “This steel here is like treacle, just melting away. I hear the same sort of thing happened in the master powerhouse this evening. Flywheel went spongy, or something, and just blew to bits.”

  “Oh?” Clem looked thoughtful. “It did, did it? Any serious damage?”

  “Chief engineer killed and light and power cut off. It’s the impossibility of it all. This city is so flawless the thought of even a screw coming loose is unheard of. Anyhow, let’s have your index cards.”

  Buck delayed in handing his over whilst Clem did some fast thinking to explain away the anxious Lucy. Presently the officer turned to her and she looked at him uneasily, fumbling in. the borrowed mining tunic which Clem had loaned her before they had left the site.

  “Come along, miss!” the officer insisted impatiently. “I have a lot to do.”

  “S-sorry. I—er—I seem to have lost my card.”

  “Of course you did!” Clem exclaimed suddenly, trying to sound as though he had just remembered something. “Don’t you remember, when we were out of town something fell and we were in too much of a hurry to bother with it? That must have been what it was.”

  “What’s your number?” the guard asked.

  “She’s Worker Ten, Domestic Section,” Clem said quickly.

  “Domestic Section? What’s she doing out here, coming from the city outskirts?”

  “She was staying with friends and we picked her up,” Buck Cardew said levelly.

  “Mmm, I see. See you produce your index-card at Civic Headquarters tomorrow, without fail.” The officer handed Lucy a ticket. “Now all three of you had better get off this bridge. What’s left of your car will be returned to you later on. Move along, please.”

  They turned away, glancing at each other in the dim light.

  “That,” Buck commented, “was even more uncomfortably close than that dash across the bridge. We’ll square it all right tomorrow with Worker Ten’s card.”

  “Uh-huh,” Clem agreed absently.

  “Queer,” Lucy remarked, “that a bridge of steel should actually melt like that—and a powerhouse flywheel fly apart and a brake snap on the car. Sounds very much like ‘troubles never come singly’ as we used to say in my time.…” Her voice trailed off into wistfulness for a moment; then it dawned on the two silently pacing men that she was crying softly to herself.

  “Here now, Ancient, this won’t do,” Buck told her, his great arm about her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Homesick?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?” she asked, between sniffs. “There’s Reggie, and my baby, and— It all seems so recent to me. As though only a few hours ago I was with them. And now I’m here, with the knowledge that I can never see or know of them again.”r />
  “It’s tough all right,” Clem agreed, dislodging Buck’s arm and putting his own in its place, “but we’ll look after you. We’re not such bad folks when you get to understand our ways—even though we’ll probably seem a bit regimented.”

  More pacing and Lucy slowly recovered again. Then she asked a question: “I suppose you’ve no idea what’s gone wrong with the steel?”

  “None whatever,” Clem replied. “It’s a complete mystery.”

  “I’ve got one angle on it,” Buck said, thinking. “It’s probably the work of Eastern agents. They’re everywhere, honeycombing the West. Some new scientific devilry of theirs, I’ll gamble.”

  “Possibly,” Clem agreed. “If so, they’ve got a mighty fine weapon!”

  They finished the rest of the journey on foot, each busily thinking, and by the time they had reached Buck Cardew’s home in the city’s heart, the lights had come on again and power was working normally.

  Mrs. Cardew, slim, practical, and dark-headed, was clearly discomfited by the power failure.

  “Is something the matter, Eva?” Buck asked in surprise. “Outside of the blackout, I mean.”

  “Yes, Buck, I—” She stopped, looking past Clem towards Lucy.

  “Friend of mine,” Clem smiled. “Lucy Denby. We found her in rather peculiar circumstances— Well, we’ll need you to help us.”

  “I know you can,” Buck added reassuringly. “This girl has got to have protection and she can’t get it anywhere better than right here.”

  “Willingly,” Eva assented. “But who is she? I mean what Grade?”

  “No Grade at all. She’s come direct from 2009 A.D. She’s an Ancient Briton. Remember reading about them in the History Recorders?”

  Eva Cardew stared blankly; and she stared even more as the story was unfolded to her. Finally she looked at Lucy for confirmation.

  “Yes, it’s true,” Lucy sighed. “I’ll try not to seem too dense in face of the scientific wonders you must have in this Age of yours, and I do thank all of you for the way in which you’ve helped me—”